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I was trying to programmatically go through presidential campaign contributions to see which web 2.0 people contributed to which candidates. You can get the data file indiv08.zip on the site http://www.fec.gov/finance/disclosure/ftpdet.shtml#a2007_2008

I can parse out who contributed and how much they contributed, but I cannot figure out who the contribution went to. There seems to be some ID, but it does not match the candidate IDs in any other file I can find. If you can help with this, I think I could make a pretty nice page showing who contributed to which candidate.

update -- I wonder if I just misunderstand this contribution system. Perhaps candidates cannot receive contributions at all, only committees? For example I see "C00431445OBAMA FOR AMERICA" received a lot of contributions. That makes it a bit more complicated then to associate those committees to candidates. Basically I want to know who supported Obama and who supported McCain.

+2  A: 

On page 3 of the tutorial that is linked at the top of the page you liked to contains the column names including "Candidate Identification".

Unkwntech
I saw that too but I don't see where to correlate it with the candidate list. As an example, here's the first record:C00000042AMY P2893008274215 Hindman, Craig A. Palatine IL60067So the ID is IL60067. But the candidate file doesn't contain that.
Mark Allen